If you’re wondering which SugarCRM features make the SaaS platform for CX teams stand out, you’re in the right place. SugarCRM is one of the highest-rated and most popular tools for customer relationship management. This flexible platform has grown drastically in the last few years and is designed to align sales, marketing, and service teams.
Today, the comprehensive ecosystem includes marketing automation capabilities, state-of-the-art generative AI, and even an app marketplace for extensibility.
So, which SugarCRM features should your team use to increase customer loyalty, boost sales, and gain a competitive edge? Let’s find out.
10 Fantastic SugarCRM Features for CX Leaders
SugarCRM is a comprehensive customer relationship management toolkit with solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service teams.
It’s ranked as a niche player in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for B2B marketing automation platforms. SugarCRM is also a “Challenger” in the Gartner salesforce automation Magic Quadrant. It’s available in a range of packages, from the “Serve” plan, starting at $80 per month, to the comprehensive “Enterprise” plan for on-premises control (starting at $85 per month).
Each plan includes a range of impressive capabilities to discover. Today, we’re looking at just some of the most exciting SugarCRM features for CX teams.
1. Comprehensive CRM Flexibility
One of the most impressive things about SugarCRM is the platform’s flexibility. While many CRM solutions integrate with sales and contact center solutions, SugarCRM goes further. The customizable platform empowers companies to unlock the benefits of immersive CX with custom modules, layouts, code, and third-party plugins.
Thanks to “Sugar Studio,” companies can create unique mobile layouts for their CRM. Plus, the Sugar Module builder supports the development of custom modules for each business process.
There’s even the option to configure core functionality, like sub-panel visibility, job schedulers, and user access controls. SugarCRM also supports more than 30 languages, providing access to frameworks for adding more languages as your company grows. The mobile-optimized platform even supports hybrid and remote teams on the move, with a dedicated offline mode.
2. Generative AI SugarCRM features
Generative AI is taking the contact center by storm, empowering greater efficiency and productivity in every customer-facing team. In 2023, SugarCRM unveiled various generative AI tools for different user groups. These include:
- Marketing AI: Automatically generate personalized marketing campaigns, landing pages, and emails, with included segmentation and translation.
- Generative AI for sales: Instantly create personalized emails and sales copy, proposals, and data-driven call scripts with real-time customer intelligence.
- Customer service AI: Use generative AI to create service ticket summarizations, product documentation, and personalized user guides.
With the range of generative AI tools, companies can summarize data, find recommended answers to questions, compose personalized content, and even create ad-hoc reports and workflows.
3. Predictions, Reporting, and Forecasting
Most leading CRM platforms include comprehensive reporting features, but we’re particularly impressed by the SugarCRM features for business insights. First, SugarCRM has its own predictive AI engine, which leverages historical information to provide insights for marketing and sales teams.
This solution allows companies to offer proactive customer service, offering insights into intent, customer requirements, and journey data. There’s even the option to add sentiment analysis features. The SugarCRM suite for sales teams helps with sales forecasting, offering immediate overviews of real-time and historical performance to drive intelligent decision-making.
Plus, SugarCRM features a phenomenal selection of CX dashboards and reports. You can monitor metrics in real-time across sales, customer service, and marketing. Users can create customized reports and visual dashboards, displaying data in various formats. Moreover, you can automate notifications and alerts to help boost team performance and reactivity.
4. Omnichannel Routing and Self-Service
Customers expect streamlined and personalized service across every channel, so omnichannel capabilities are becoming crucial in the CRM landscape. Fortunately, SugarServe, the service-focused aspect of SugarCRM, features everything businesses need for omnichannel success.
There are powerful case-tracking dashboards to monitor customer journeys across multiple channels. Plus, the unified ecosystem for customer service management includes direct access to SugarPredict sentiment analysis. You can even integrate your ecosystem with social media tools for deeper insights into every customer touchpoint.
SugarCRM excels at empowering self-service, too. Companies can create branded self-service portals with knowledgebase articles and FAQ sections. There’s even a WYSIWYG theme designer to help non-coders create better service portals. Users can immediately find answers to questions, track open cases, and access embedded chat capabilities.
5. SugarCRM features for marketing automation
Unlike other CRM solutions, SugarCRM doesn’t just focus on service. It simultaneously aligns every part of the customer journey, supporting sales, marketing, and service teams. Business leaders can use predictive lead-scoring tools to find their best sales and conversion opportunities.
From there, employees can engage with customers through inbound and outbound email, social media, and even Google Ads. There are even tools for creating comprehensive campaigns with landing pages, conversion forms, and bulk emails. Responsive drag-and-drop builders and pre-set templates ensure employees don’t need coding knowledge to nurture prospects.
Plus, the built-in AI tools in SugarCRM make it easy to create more personalized campaigns, enhanced with lead scoring technology, BI-grade reporting, and automatic machine learning.
6. SugarBPM (Process Automation)
In today’s fast-paced customer service landscape, automation is often the key to boosting efficiency and productivity. With SugarBPM, companies can streamline everyday business processes with automated approvals, call triaging, and more.
The workflow and business process management tool adds advanced BPM capabilities to SugarCRM’s ecosystems and modules. This platform allows business leaders to create workflows based on their specific needs and minimize repetitive tasks.
You can even integrate the ecosystem with external systems to draw data from different parts of your business and minimize silos.
7. Sales Automation
From a sales perspective, SugarCRM features a range of tools to help companies sell more, retain customers, and increase loyalty. The unified ecosystem offers a comprehensive overview of customer records, cases, and activities on a single screen.
You can monitor employee performance as a supervisor and automate complex sales processes with built-in productivity tools. There are even options to create smart guides for team members and automated quotes to increase deal velocity.
Like all SugarCRM tools, the sales features come with built-in analytics, including historical and real-time reporting. Plus, there are end-to-end CRM campaign management tools to track the impact of each sales and marketing campaign on business revenue.
8. SugarCRM features for Team Management
SugarCRM excels at bringing teams together for a comprehensive approach to business growth. The platform features excellent security and access management features so businesses can preserve compliance standards. You can even alter access based on each employee’s role.
Unlike other leading tools, SugarCRM comes with built-in capabilities for project management, complete with customizable automation rules. Business leaders can track cases, bugs, customer profiles, and team performance in one location.
There’s also a fantastic “Activity Streams” feature. This allows users to view a complete list of activities performed on records. Users can track the most recent updates across their entire organization and filter content based on the information they need.
9. On-Premises CRM Solutions
Speaking of security and compliance, SugarCRM is a particularly valuable platform for companies with strict regulatory guidelines to follow. The “Sugar Enterprise” version of the platform is built for maximum control and customization.
You can access all of the APIs available to SugarCRM without hidden licensing costs and limitations. Plus, you can create custom CRM applications for specific use cases. The on-premises version of the CRM platform still features innovative solutions like SugarBPM for routing and automation.
Plus, you get complete control over how you manage your data and processes. SugarCRM doesn’t lock users into proprietary technology, so you can optimize, scale, and change your solution as your company grows.
10. Integrations and Extensibility
As mentioned above, SugarCRM is one of the most flexible platforms for customer relationship management. It provides access to a range of modules, customization tools, and deployment options and integrates seamlessly with a host of business apps.
SugarCRM integrates seamlessly with Google apps (Google Workplace), Slack, and DocuSign to improve team productivity. The Sugar Add-Ons marketplace offers a vast range of popular integrations to explore, from contact center connectors to tools for email marketing.
Notably, every add-on undergoes a rigorous approval process to ensure it works efficiently with the SugarCRM platform. Plus, SugarCRM promises a 100% satisfaction guarantee with all “SugarOutfitters” integrations, with a 30-day refund policy.
The Top SugarCRM Features for CX Teams
SugarCRM empowers customer-facing teams to accomplish more by combining exceptional versatility and flexibility with end-to-end security and phenomenal insights. Whether you’re investing in enhancing your sales, marketing, or service teams, SugarCRM has something for everyone.
The company’s continued commitment to upgrading its platform with automation, integration, and AI solutions means it can adapt to any business need. If you’re looking for a flexible platform to unify your CX experts, SugarCRM could be ideal for you.
